Coleman Barks - Wikipedia
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check out these categories:

American translators

Iranologists

Poets from Tennessee

Sufi poets

University of California, Berkeley alumni

this mf is a bit on Trillbilly’s podcast lol

  • CantaloupeAss [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    6 months ago

    U have no idea how deep of an internet hole I went down after your first comment, and so I have concluded that I want to check out these translations:

    • War and Peace tr. by Ann Dunnigan
    • Dead Souls by Gogol, tr. by Guerney and Fusso
    • Notes from Underground tr. by Garnett, edited by Matlaw

    I simultaneously thank u & blame u for putting me to rethinking the Russian lit section of my bookshelf lol

    • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.

      Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)

      Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -

      • David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (the most casually readable one on this list)
      • George Steiner’s After Babel (controversial but worthwhile)
      • Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (I know, I know, Ezra Pound, but he and John Dryden are the godfathers of translation theory for poetry and this predates his fascism)
      • Barton Raffel’s The Art of Translating Poetry
      • Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei